White people in North America live in a social environment that protects
and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of
racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at
the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to
what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which
even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a
range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of
emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as
argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These
behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. This
paper explicates the dynamics of White Fragility.

I am a white woman. I am standing beside a black woman. We are facing a
group of white people who are seated in front of us. We are in their
workplace, and have been hired by their employer to lead them in a
dialogue about race. The room is filled with tension and charged with
hostility. I have just presented a definition of racism that includes
the acknowledgment that whites hold social and institutional power over
people of color. A white man is pounding his fist on the table. His face
is red and he is furious. As he pounds he yells, “White people have been
discriminated against for 25 years! A white person can’t get a job
anymore!” I look around the room and see 40 employed people, all white.
There are no people of color in this workplace. Something is happening
here, and it isn’t based in the racial reality of the workplace. I am
feeling unnerved by this man’s disconnection with that reality, and his
lack of sensitivity to the impact this is having on my cofacilitator,
the only person of color in the room. Why is this white man so angry?
Why is he being so careless about the impact of his anger? Why are all
the other white people either sitting in silent agreement with him or
tuning out? We have, after all, only articulated a definition of racism.
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects
and insulates them from race-based stress.^1 Fine1 identifies this
insulation when she observes “… how Whiteness accrues privilege and
status; gets itself surrounded by protective pillows of resources and/or
benefits of the doubt; how Whiteness repels gossip and voyeurism and
instead demands dignity”. Whites are rarely without these “protective
pillows,” and when they are, it is usually temporary and by choice. This
insulated environment of racial privilege builds white expectations for
racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate
racial stress.

For many white people, a single required multicultural education course
taken in college, or required “cultural competency training” in their
workplace, is the only time they may encounter a direct and sustained
challenge to their racial understandings. But even in this arena, not
all multicultural courses or training programs talk directly about
racism, much less address white privilege. It is far more the norm for
these courses and programs to use racially coded language such as
“urban,” “inner city,” and “disadvantaged” but to rarely use “white” or
“overadvantaged” or “privileged.” This racially coded language
reproduces racist images and perspectives while it simultaneously
reproduces the comfortable illusion that race and its problems are what
“they” have, not us. Reasons why the facilitators of these courses and
trainings may not directly name the dynamics and beneficiaries of racism
range from the lack of a valid analysis of racism by white facilitators,
personal and economic survival strategies for facilitators of color, and
the overall pressure from management to keep the content comfortable and
palatable for whites. However, if and when an educational program does
directly address racism and the privileging of whites, common white
responses include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt,
argumentation, and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the
pressure on facilitators to avoid directly addressing racism). So-called
progressive whites may not respond with anger, but may still insulate
themselves via claims that they are beyond the need for engaging with
the content because they “already had a class on this” or “already know
this.” These reactions are often seen in anti-racist education endeavors
as forms of resistance to the challenge of internalized
dominance2.
These reactions do indeed function as resistance, but it may be useful
to also conceptualize them as the result of the reduced psychosocial
stamina that racial insulation inculcates. I call this lack of racial
stamina “White Fragility.”

^1: Although white racial insulation is somewhat mediated by social
class (with poor and working class urban whites being generally less
racially insulated than suburban or rural whites), the larger social
environment insulates and protects whites as a group through
institutions, cultural representations, media, school textbooks, movies,
advertising, dominant discourses, etc.

Although mainstream definitions of racism are typically some variation
of individual “race prejudice”, which anyone of any race can have,
Whiteness scholars define racism as encompassing economic, political,
social, and cultural structures, actions, and beliefs that systematize
and perpetuate an unequal distribution of privileges, resources and
power between white people and people of color3. This unequal
distribution benefits whites and disadvantages people of color overall
and as a group. Racism is not fluid in the U.S.; it does not flow back
and forth, one day benefiting whites and another day (or even era)
benefiting people of color. The direction of power between whites and
people of color is historic, traditional, normalized, and deeply
embedded in the fabric of U.S. society4. Whiteness itself refers to the
specific dimensions of racism that serve to elevate white people over
people of color. This definition counters the dominant representation of
racism in mainstream education as isolated in discrete behaviors that
some individuals may or may not demonstrate, and goes beyond naming
specific privileges.5 Whites are theorized as actively shaped, affected,
defined, and elevated through their racialization and the individual and
collective consciousness’ formed within it6. Recognizing that the terms
I am using are not “theory neutral ‘descriptors’ but theory laden
constructs inseparable from systems of injustice”7, I use the terms
white and Whiteness to describe a social process.
Frankenberg8 defines
Whiteness as multi-dimensional:

Whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege.
Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a place from which White people look at
ourselves, at others, and at society. Third, ‘Whiteness’ refers to a set
of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.
Frankenberg and other theorists9 use Whiteness to signify a set of
locations that are historically, socially, politically and culturally
produced, and which are intrinsically linked to dynamic relations of
domination. Whiteness is thus conceptualized as a constellation of
processes and practices rather than as a discrete entity (i.e. skin
color alone). Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all
times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic
rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be
commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded
to white people. Whiteness Studies begin with the premise that racism
and white privilege exist in both traditional and modern forms, and
rather than work to prove its existence, work to reveal it. This article
will explore the dynamics of one aspect of Whiteness and its effects,
White Fragility.